Saturn comes after Venus. Whereas Venus brings us into the world of desires and happiness and pleasure and, most of all, people, Saturn senses the limitations of anything in the world and realizes it’s all going to end. Saturn is the part of us that realizes the enormity of time and the effects of time to obliterate all things of matter, including our bodies and people we love and the awareness that everything is going to end at some point.

This sounds very bleak, but it’s only bleak if we’re immature. This fear of death compels us to get to know our self on a deeper level, and, in fact, it’s only when we face the threat of losing something that we truly appreciate it. This is the greatness of Saturn. We see things taken from us that we love, that we care about, that we thought were going to be there. Once this happens, we must look much more deeply into the nature of it and of life itself and find an answer. The nature of Saturn, in this way, makes us grow up.

Saturn makes us mature about life and the way things are here. We try to run from these unpleasant truths, and we remain immature and childish. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with the way things are. Once we realize the nature of who we are as a spiritual being, then the truth of Saturn becomes a great power for us because we’ve made peace with our fears and no until we make peace with our fears will we be able to overcome them and relax into the fullness of truth and love in our hearts.

Saturn can be an energy that feels as if we’ve been cheated, as if things haven’t been fair, as if time has not been fair to us, so you’ll see many old people wind up feeling bitter and hanging onto the past because they’ve not grown and they’ve not matured. This is the problem of Saturn. We must realize the nature of life, learn to let go of things. Everything has its time, and then that time passes.
This is maturity, and this is the Saturn growth process. Once we’re able to do that, we’re able to live in solitude without clinging to others to make us feel happy, to make us feel safe.

Saturn comes after Venus because Venus is very related to other people and the world of happiness, and Saturn realizes that that, too, is limited. And that will change. That will end, and we must face this in truth. And, when we do, we wind up being able to create the greatest joy in life. And that is to be happy for no reason, to be present, and to be resting in our true nature.

Venus is the planet that comes after Jupiter, whereas Jupiter is very concerned with larger themes of the world, big abstract concepts that have us looking to expand all of the messy details of life. Venus brings us right back into those details. Venus rules the senses and the sense mind and the feeling of happiness. And, in many ways, Venus has what we all want. We spent most of our life pursuing Venus things. We all wake up in the morning and want to have good food and be around nice people and have enjoyable and pleasant experiences. This quality of life comes from Venus. She gives us the awareness that we can be happy. And, it’s really the joy of life that we’re all hoping to express.

So, our life on earth is really a very Venus experience. And in fact, it’s true, we are here to try to be happy. But, we must learn to be happy for no reason. This is the higher lesson of Venus. This is why Venus is exalted in the sign Pisces, because Pisces knows no boundaries, so when Venus is in Pisces, our happiness is not based on any external condition.

Venus on the Half-Shell

The debilitation point of Venus and Virgo shows where we place a lot of conditions on our happiness, because Virgo is the sign of details and certain conditions and criteria that must be met. Venus comes after Jupiter because Jupiter can be very disconnected from the earth, and people and trying to rise above all of the details of life on earth. So, Venus comes next and brings those high concepts into the world of the senses and pleasures and patience and shows where we can’t just rise above people and rise above our problems. We need to learn how to deal with them and manage them and accommodate everyone’s views. This is the higher quality of Venus. She accepts everyone’s views and points of view as valid.

Whereas Jupiter is judgmental and religious and may tend to say “this is the only right way”. Venus comes next and gives respect for all ways and all paths, whereas Jupiter is like the preacher on the pulpit telling us we will all go to hell unless we do the right thing. Venus would never do that. The evolutionary process of Venus is to transform our desire for sensual happiness and conditional happiness into the unconditional love, where we find beauty and respect in all things, rather than just in the things that make us happy for our self.

Jupiter comes after Mercury, whereas Mercury is that flexible quality of life where we try many different things but we don’t really have a direction, we don’t really have a goal in mind, we’re very neutral about the outcome because we’re experimenting and playing. Jupiter is where we sense that life has meaning and purpose and we try to connect with that purpose.

So Jupiter comes after Mercury to connect all of that information gathering with a higher goal and purpose. So Jupiter is all about meaning, philosophy, hope and bigger things in life. Because even though life is in the details, which is how most people look at things, those details need some sort of meaning and some sort of goal if they’re going to lead to growth.

This quality of growth is really important with Jupiter areas of life. Jupiter is all about growth and expansion in all ways. For instance, Jupiter is related to children because children grow. He’s related to teachers and teachings because teachers and teaching expand us and make us grow. So it’s this sense of hope and meaning and purpose in life that is related to Jupiter.

Jupiter is the biggest planet in the sky, he’s the part of us that is big and we sense that there’s something big inside of us and we want to feel it. We want to feel connected to it and when we’re not, we suffer. Even if we fulfill all of our desires and we have the wife, the child, the job, we look for more – a deeper meaning behind those things.

There’s more to life than stuff, but what is it? What are we looking for? Why is it that all human beings feel the need to grow? Grow toward what? These are the big questions of our life and these are the areas that Jupiter rules. So Jupiter is the part of us that gives us the sense that there’s more to life than just satisfying our desires. There’s a whole host of important things that we need to learn and areas of life that are bigger than just here and now.

So Jupiter sends us searching for a teacher. Then we find things like religion and meaning and purpose in those higher qualities of life. The difficulty with Jupiter is we may feel disconnected from the day to day details of life and instead of processing things, we may try to rise above them and explain them away to some big philosophy, much like a person who is a religious zealot only wants to explain things through their big abstract ideas. But when it comes down to talking to people as individuals, they may miss them, they may talk over them and they may even talk down to them.

So with Jupiter, it’s about trying to live the life in the world, but also to stay connected to the other world.

But, Mercury comes next and says “well maybe this isn’t right, maybe there is more information that I can learn, I’m going to see what this is all about”. Mercury experiments, tries new things, and then thinks about it, ponders it, talks about it, Mercury is very good at flexibility, communication with others and really just gathering information and seeing what is true rather than just following blindly what we’ve been taught in the past.

So, the nature of Mercury brings variety to life, brings playfulness, brings curiosity, brings humor, all of these things give us the potential to not stay stuck in our angry ways when things don’t go the way we want. When something comes our way, when something blocks our path, the worse thing that happens is we get a little irritated, because that’s the nature of Mars, because these are actions at the moment. But Mercury comes next, say “wait a minute, what is this?” And we may even be able to enjoy it, because Mercury is flexible. He tries to figure out what happens or what happened and then make an adjustment. This is how we learn through life. We become flexible. We’re not just locked into the way we’ve been taught.

The evolutionary process of Mercury has to do with taking all of those details and that flexibility and being very detached from our philosophies and dogmas. The difficulty with Mercury is we may just always play and fool around, perhaps gossip, perhaps not want to do anything serious, or not want to go anywhere, but just fool around. So, whereas Mars moves straight ahead forward, Mercury moves from side to side. He’s not goal oriented. He’s in the present moment, enjoying and experimenting.

The evolutionary process of Mercury means we must take action, take that detail oriented, innocent and open approach – but do something important with it, rather than just play and waste our time. When this happens, Mercury becomes the king of discrimination where we’re able to figure things out intellectually and understand the world rationally, which is what we’re all trying to do.

We’re all gathering information, because we want to know the answer, and Mercury is the part of us that is interested and curious in all of the answers like the child is curious and wanting to know why things work and how they work. This is an important area of life, so that we can understand our teachings rather than be just an agent of dogma.

The moon is our capacity to feel and receive and integrate. We often experience this as our emotions and our desire for connection. All sorts of connection – the connection we have with each other, also the connections we have with our senses and where our inner environment connects with our outer environment. This is what the moon is about.

We have this limited matrix of mind and body through which we interface with the world, but our deeper self, that self within us, is not really of this world. Somehow, the moon tries to bridge these impossible spheres of existence – the limited, that which will decay – the unlimited, and that which is eternal. This is where the moon does its work and why we naturally feel a little bit of stress and anxiety in life. We are trying to bridge the impossible opposites.

The only way for us to actually connect these two is through the heart, through love, through receptivity, through patience, and those things come from the moon. We would like our boundaries to overrun everything so that all of life dissolves into one, organic, whole unity where we feel connected to the great flow of life and other people and everything, rather than feeling all of the disparity of life, where things are incomplete and distinct and nothing feels like us.

This angst and stress is why we have emotions. The emotions are produced when we look outside of ourselves to try to feel calm and we look outside of ourselves to try to bring something toward us that will make us feel whole and make us feel connected. But the truth is,
the only source of peace and connection, is within our own heart. The moon shows where we must go inside to find the truth of who we really are through the heart and dissolve all of the apparent distinctions and differences in life.

Whereas the sun has the capacity to assert, as we express ourselves externally in a confident manner, the moon is where we must reflect. It’s the opening through which everything comes in, so the moon has no aggressive qualities.

BIO

Sam Geppi (Sadasiva) is the author of “Yoga and Vedic Astrology” and “The Ascendant-108 Planets of Vedic Astrology”. He is the founder of the American Academy of Vedic Art and Science – which offers level 1-3 Certification programs in Vedic Astrology. Currently the Academy has more than 250 students enrolled. Sam is certified level 1 and 2 through ACVA and CVA and was hired by Dattatreya Shiva Baba to teach the first Astroved Vedic Astrology Certification Program in 2010.